should i fix this lol
new stuff I have out in 2025 dump
The original idea behind ReadOnly was 1) a post-twitter place to link to new things I’ve written or worked on in some way, and 2) write lil blurbs about stuff I’m reading, to add some je ne sais quoi. This didn’t work out that well because #1 didn’t really happen all that much, and I got it in my head that this needed to be something I wrote a new issue for every week or so, so I focused on #2 to a fault, turning this into a space exhaustingly about its secondary objective, kind of for no one, not even me.
And I actually have had a wild little run of #1 in 2025, but I’ve felt like the space I attempted to create for that specific thing isn’t even it! Maybe I should fix that! I’ll try to tidy up this substack at some point in the near future to reallign with the needs of my imagined audience of people who read a single thing I wrote one time and would like to keep tabs on if I ever do that again. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t done that now.
Here’s a surprisingly multimedia journey of stuff for you.
band’s debut single is streaming now
Good Cry, the band I play guitar and keys and sing a little bit in, has its first single out! “Astoria” is streaming now on Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Bandcamp, and probably other places if those exist.
This was the first time I ever recorded a song in a studio, like, with a producer and recording engineer and everything. We’re gonna do more! Eventually. It takes a minute.
I wrote for Unwinnable about buying videogame consoles in the 2020s
The last time I wrote for a videogame website (rip KillScreen) was roughly 9 years to the day when Unwinnable ran this piece I wrote for them, “I Too Bought a PS5 for a Single Game, I Too Bear Great Regret”.
Feeling pretty grateful for this one tbh! The editor Levi and I talked through what was really at the heart of this miasma of consumerism, hype, the technological requirements of this hobby that’s sometimes art, and the changing landscape that left us feeling like it was all a bit needless. Unwinnable picked part of the below excerpt for the pull quote on social, which maybe is what this piece is “about”. Go read it!
Maybe the issue is with me and my own time management, then. Had I known how busy a year I’d have (and had I known the exclusivity window would be only a year, and that it sounds like it actually runs rather nicely on Steam Deck), then maybe I wouldn’t have felt the pressure to experience this game as fast as possible to read with and engage with the games crit reactions as soon as possible – which I still haven’t done. Maybe. We always think we have more time than we do.
It doesn’t really feel fair to claim that I bought a PS5 solely to play a single videogame and regretted doing so. I’m not even sure if what this emotion is is regret. A late capitalist media landscape of franchises and reboots often leaves an unpleasant aftertaste of feeling like you’re an easy mark, ranging from the J.J. Abrams–precision weaponized nostalgia of The Force Awakens to the live-action remakes of Disney movies coming out like clockwork despite the fact that they’ve gotten to the ones that – since you can’t use real lions or a real Stitch – don’t even make sense. The problem here is that by reframing the relationship between a text and an audience as the relationship between content and consumers, we’ve recentered art as a transactional experience. And everyone likes to think of themselves as a savvy shopper.
I wrote a video game
I wrote dialogue and music for a video game for the first time! I did a weekend-long visual novel bootcamp for the purposes of Real Book research and wound up doing a whole side quest with three people I met there doing a fantasy/romance/SWAK-themed game jam. You can play Lyceum of Leviathans, this silly little dating sim I worked on, in your browser right now!
It remains pretty buggy in its current build (it is a game jam game lol). idk when things'll get fixed; I didn't do Code Things. Only 2 of 5 songs made it into the current release, and one route seems to have a game-ending bug right before the ending. Still, first game right here!
It’s just so cool we did all this in a month. Apparently I wrote or edited almost 30k words for this in a month while preparing for Good Cry’s single release concert. No wonder I got the flu twice this year.
reading list
I’ve moved into the horror part of Real Book research, which has ranged from the basic background type reads (juggling Murray Leeder’s Horror Film: A Critical Introduction paperback and Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film on my iPad while traveling around India earlier this month depending on which felt like less of a hassle for any given mode of transportation) to the weirder, vibesier shit (Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol 1 and Claire Cronin’s Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God). Cronin’s book was especially My Shit, an experimental memoir-slash-analytical essay type of work.
A Discord I’m in is starting up a book club again, and our Valentine’s-themed pick was, inexplicably, J.G. Ballard’s Crash. For Reasons, the copy of Crash I ended up with is in iBooks (Apple Books? idk), which has unintentionally resulted in the book I'm reading when I find myself with time to kill but haven't brought anything with me to read on purpose... ie when I'm sitting in a car waiting for street sweeping to end … is about car crashes.
Favorite thing I’m reading at the moment is Rachel Cusk’s Parade, which is really scratching that “what is a novel” shit itch for me, got me thinking about the type of novel I’d like to write one day, whether I have the Power to do so (probs no, since I’m not even totally certain what’s going on in Parade, but I’m enjoying letting it wash over me)
Intermezzo ripped
Am I still doing wtf is pedro páramo? I dunno. I got the flu at the end of January and have still not returned from an unannounced hiatus. It’s possible that experimental return to the world of book recap blogging has really just resulted in: idk if book recap blogging is viable or interesting anymore in 2025. As much as I’d like to see it through “just because” or let it get Weird… I’m realizing that during this time I’ve not been writing it, I’ve had more time for other, objectively higher-priority projects, so, I don’t know. Maybe, if I figure out an extremely nontaxing angle somehow, but I also definitely need to learn to just let things die sometimes.
Speaking of focus, I’m trying to pull together any semblance of staying focused on videogames, but I guess I can accept that I just don’t have the headspace at the moment to really get invested in a big story game quite right now. Or maybe all my problems will be solved if I spent $200 on that cool new PlayStation One-themed MiSTer? Not like I wrote a whole article linked in this post about throwing money at a videogame time problem or anything.
Although certainly not not part of the problem is that, as a person spending most of my prime energy hours on a computer for my job, I end up using brain time reading shit on the internet. Even though I have been making an effort to read, like, Real things instead of just doomscrolling. Admittedly this is just giving “I read a lot of substacks I guess” a nice haircut. Julia Harrison’s orzo bimbo often feels like reading a novel.
Matthew Weddig (he/him) is an editor and guitarist currently writing a book about dating and romance in video games. He lives in Brooklyn, where he makes his cat watch horror movies with him. He sort of posts on Instagram and BlueSky, and his bylines, poetry, and bands can be found at linktr.ee/matthewjulius.